Friday, December 25, 2015

Inquiries

Photo by Mira van Dongen

Throughout the summer we labored to
exhaustion, all waking hours in motion, farming by hand.We bent our bodies to the earth.We cut and callused our hands.Our backs ached.At the end of some days Caitlin was close to
tears.I went numb and silent some
evenings; and it was all we could do to cook a meal and fall asleep beneath the
stars.Usually I would read while
Caitlin cooked dinner.The stories we
read (the Grapes of Wrath by John
Steinbeck, Walking with the Comrades
and essays by Arundhati Roy, One Hundred
Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) were part of a process of
reaching outward, searching for a resonance of experience, and locating
ourselves in our place and time in relation to other lives.Reading about the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl
to California, reading about indigenous villages in the Narmada River Valley
being flooded by the government of India in this new millennium, reading about
war and bombs, atomic and otherwise – it strikes us that this work we are doing
of bringing sustenance from the land with care is peace work.It is work that directly concerns the freedom
of people.If we can bend our backs to
this, then maybe there doesn’t need to be war over resources.Maybe there actually doesn’t need to be
slavery (economic or otherwise) anymore in this world.

In August, a sudden bloom of white-winged
butterflies filled the air.One evening,
after a long dry day of shepherding and gleaning fallen seed heads from the
brown barley fields, Caitlin cooked supper on the outdoor wood stove while we
read Walking with the Comrades with
our adopted American little brother Ben.Dubbed by the locals ‘Senge Namgyal’ for Ladakh’s greatest king and
builder of palaces, he came with a student group in July and felt drawn to the
people and the work of this remote village.He decided to stay on for the fall.Walking with the Comrades
details the story of Arundhati Roy’s journey to the forests of Dandakaranya in
central India in 2011.There mining
interests are moving in, and an indigenous Adivasi population has transformed
into an armed Maoist revolution.

Many indigenous populations in India were
written out of their land when the new Indian state’s constitution ratified
coonial policy and dlared that all undeeded lands (in effect all lands of
illiterate people) now belonged to the state.The people of the Forest Department (in their minds, removing illegal
residents) trampled crops with elephants and burned the fields of people who
knew only their ways of living from the land.This violence and oppression went on for years until the newly formed
Maoist forces moved in and violently pushed the Forest Department out.The Maoists had gained some power and trust
of the local people by organizing strikes that were effective in moving the
wages of gatherers of forest products toward less exploitative rates.In response to the Maoists, the government
sent in police forces whose presence has meant only continuing terror for most
Adivasis.Many regular people saw their
livelihoods destroyed, their friends and families jailed, raped, and murdered
by state-sponsored police actions.Enlistments into the Maoist People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army skyrocketed.

How different are our desires and the
desires of these Adivasi people, who are forced from their lands and lives
without access to literacy, money, or a process of justice?We want a peaceful life rooted in the land.And yet how incredibly different are the
conditions of our lives?How different
from these Adivasis are the desires of the Ladakhi people with whom we have the
privilege to live and work each day?None
of us want any alien force invading our lives, forcing us out, making our lives
miserable.And yet some people receive
such treatment, and others do not.Why?What would we do if we were
born in Dandakaranya, without the privileges of plenty of food, fine education,
enough money, access to land and dignified jobs?Would we also pick up weapons and take to the
woods, a final and dangerous choice for some kind of power in the face of
forces that are bent on our destruction?Or would we give up, move to the slums of a city, and scrape a living
selling our labor or our bodies, malnourished, without clean water?We speak together about this.We don’t know the answers.

Is mining bauxite worth forcing people to
make these kinds of choices?

From Roy’s reporting, the Maoist leaders
are by no means perfect.However, they
do have a direct understanding of the lives and concerns of the people of the
area – they all live in the same woods – and they do represent an alternative
position to the dominant one, which places resource extraction before people’s
sustainable livelihoods.I wish the
government of India and the states involved would sit down with the Maoist
leaders and actually try to figure out a deal that would modestly benefit all
parties.Instead, Indian elites seem to
be happy to throw money and lives into a war against their own citizens so that
their compatriots’ mining companies can clear the forests, tear resources from
the earth, and strike it rich. The
profits they make doing this are absurd, on the order of hundreds of times
their capital investments.

My intention in relating this story is not
to point blame at India or at certain Indian people.The U.S. government is guilty of far more
crimes and far worse ones than the Indian government.This story of modern day India echoes
throughout the history of the world and particularly through the appalling
story of white supremacy and white power that continues today.The histories most of us learn in school are
subtly changed; they acknowledge the endless conquests, wars and genocides, yet
leave our people and our past and current ruling elites somehow absolved of
wrongdoing.Also, the direct flow
between the miseries of far-off ecosystems and people, and the daily
consumption of the global north, remains ignored or dulled down.Turn on the TV for ten minutes and you will
understand the profit motive and the way it plays on our emotions and seeps
into our minds.‘All is copacetic, and I
really could use a new spring style.’ Behind this veil, a global Empire has
grown around us.

The atrocities of this Empire are legion. One example: in the ten years that followed
the first U.S.-led bombing and invasion of Iraq (in January 1991), about half a
million Iraqi children died as a result of U.S. economic sanctions (Arnove,
Iraq Under Siege).They died because
they lacked food, clean water, and medical care.Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Ambassador to
the United Nations, said with regard to this: ‘I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.’(1)Who’s ‘we’?She didn’t lose her job.Iraq holds some of the largest oil reserves
in the world.Who earned multi-billion
dollar contracts for reconstructing Iraq’s infrastructure after the second U.S.
invasion in 2003?Halliburton and
Bechtel, both of which are business partners with the Bush administration.Who controls that oil now?

The ruthless human quest for economic power
is anything but new.It has led to
genocide time and again.American
Indians – that is called ‘colonialism.’Africans, 30 million kidnapped and transported to the states alone, half
of whom died on the way.And now victims
of climate change, dying from the privileged world’s two hundred years of
reckless fossil fueled power.To name a
few.Here’s something our ally Winston
Churchill said in 1937 about the Palestinians:

‘I do not agree that the dog in the manger
has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a
very long time.I do not admit that
right.I do not admit, for instance,
that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black
people of Australia.I do not admit that
a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a
higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in
and taken their place.’(2)

He’s one of those heroes of our
civilization, right?Defeated the Nazis,
yes?

In 1945 we dropped atomic bombs on Japanese
people (not soldiers) and scared them so much they surrendered.Every year since then we have bombed and gone
to war against poor countries.Every
year.Can we talk about this?Did Vietnam (1961-73) and Panama (1989) pose
credible threats to the American people?What force on earth could provoke such behavior?What are the consequences of affluence?How much do we love the
American Dream?

It’s wonderful that modern peacefulness in
the industrialized world supports a rejection of violence and discrimination
based on income level, political views, nationality, gender identity, sexual
orientation, skin color, and so on.However, actually defending this kind of justice in the world outside
the rich countries would take some major economic transformations, and some
sacrifices by us, the privileged few.

Wealth, power, and aggression do seem to
inspire a certain kind of respect.When
an Indian engineer visited the village of Tar to plan the first electric grid,
soon to be installed, we sat down together and he asked me where I am from.‘America,’ I say.‘Very nice!Very nice!’ he responds.I don’t
know where to begin.What does he know
of this legendary place?What has
Hollywood shown him?

This fellow came off as kind and pragmatic,
down-to earth.Then a tall man
approached from behind him with bold steps.The rushing waters muffled his footfalls.The tall man strode up and tapped the rock
behind the engineer loudly with a stick.The engineer started, whipped his head around to see who it was, and as
he turned back to me his voice suddenly doubled in volume.He began a proud and passionate stream of
language about ‘India’ (this word he yelled) and a new great age and how they
would bring civilization to all ‘backward’ places, ‘no matter the cost!’I was alarmed (I usually think the costs are
worth considering), and managed to say: ‘You must really want to help these
people,’ glancing at the tall man with the cavalier grin standing behind
him.‘I just get excited sometimes,’ he
said with a bashful smile.

In this part of India people are seeing
some benefits of ‘development’.In other
parts tens of millions of people who were living from the land and had almost
no carbon footprint are no wage laborers in slums or worse, because their
villages and forests have been flooded by big dams.Now their lives are entirely dependent on
fossil fuels.They were ‘backward’
places.I wonder how they feel about
entering civilization.

Tar, this village, now protected from Pakistan
by the Indian military (which includes its own sons), is still sane enough and
remote enough to be a place where the relationship between the human community
and the wild remains intact.The snow
leopards and wolves walk the paths of the people at night.The ibex are fed by the villagers, by the
soil and crops they nurture, as inadvertently and inevitably as are fed the
insects and mice who eat the excess seeds, and the lizards and foxes who feed
on them in turn.Villagers occasionally
lose a goat, a sheep, or a cow to the big predators, but they do not have a
snow leopard ‘problem’.No one sets out
to exterminate anyone else.The people
are in living, knowing relationship with these wild inhabitants of the world as
well as with every member of their human community.There is no such thing as not knowing your
neighbor.

The people here all depend on each other;
they know each other intimately, they get along, they share in lots of healthy
outdoor work, they listen even when they disagree, and their religion
encourages tolerance and placing others’ interests first.They grow nearly all of their own grains,
beans, and vegetables, and eat very little meat.They know how to build new houses of local
materials, and repair the old ones.They
have a firm hold on the basis of their lives, and their deep happiness in that
is tangible – impossible to miss.

There are ways to live and work with the
earth that produce the abundance we need, that increase the biodiversity and
health of land, and that create lifeways that do not require harming other
landbases.

India and many other ‘developing’ countries
(who did or did not get bombed by us) are following America’s model these days,
their populations willing or not, generally to the great detriment of their
human and non-human populations.Foreign
‘aid’, for the most part, enslaves those countries to us.(3)

Some questions arise for me: Can we
Americans stop asking so much of other places and other people (in oil, food,
clothes, labor, ‘products’, metal, and medicine, to name a few)?Can we figure out how to produce what we need
and take the steps to do so?Could we
one day start offering (not selling)
the precious surplus of our lives and land to those in greater need?

Hope you are both well, happy, and continuing to do and feel the love for what you're doing. I thought of you today, which marks a year since I came back from Ladakh. I often wonder how you've been living and what you're learning. Your blog is always a grateful peek into this life and how your sense of self and place has changed, which can be pretty hard to imagine. It must be very different to Secmol in some ways. Thank you for the beautiful writing and the change of perspective; it is so easy to forget to think of others and oneself in the big picture. Will be thinking about this piece in particular for a while.

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Living in Ladakh

Ladakhis: Village people of the Himalaya, who have raised families and built soil for thousands of years on glacial melt and four inches of annual rainfall. Most are practicing Tibetan Buddhists. Barley flour, wheat bread, vegetables, noodle soup, butter tea, meat, and apricots are standard fare.

Caitlin & Jason: We go to Ladakh to live and work with farmers for at least two years. Our dream is to found a joyful human community and school in Maine that increases biodiversity and lives largely from the land through hand work.

We long for a living understanding of humans as part of the natural world, reciprocal with her, responsible to her and to each other. We love simple good living, food, music, and making our own tools, clothes, and gear. We strive to live considering the ancestors, the real effects of what we do today, and the lives of many generations to come.